Idol Polls: The Top 7

Welcome back to our weekly American Idol polls round-up. Each week we look at various online polls that were conducted from the end of last week's results up to the performance show Tuesday. And then a few that were conducted after the performance show, but before the results were revealed.

This way we can analyze how the week's performances affected a contestant's overall popularity, which turns out to be not very much except in a few select cases. This week during the performance show, Simon indicated that the guys had won the night, and based on these polls it looks like American (at least the online portion of us) agrees with him. Is it really over for the girls? Can they see the writing on the walls? Will Brooke talk about it constantly droning on and on and on?

WEEK-TO-WEEK POLLS (PRE-PERFORMANCE)Look who's at the bottom of most of the polls. That's right, it's the "bounce back" queen. Able to spend weeks at a time at the bottom of virtually every poll and not get eliminated. She wasn't even "Bottom Two" this week. You go girl!

Guide to the polls:Position - [change from last week] Contestant (Percentage of votes)

AOL1 - [+2] Jason Castro (28.9%) 2 - [-1] David Archuleta (28.9%) 3 - [-1] David Cook (19.9%) 4 - [+1] Brooke White (6.8%)5 - [+2] Kristy Lee Cook (6.7%) <--6 - [=] Carly Smithson (6.1%) 7 - [+1] Syesha Mercado (2.6%)Jason's definitely benefiting from his strong performance from last week as he slides into the top spot on AOL's poll and in fact stays there after his Mariah number Tuesday. What was once a one-man race (Archuleta) and then a two-man race (the Davids) may just be a three-man race (the boys) after all.

VoteFair.org1 - [=] David Archuleta (41.9%)2 - [=] Jason Castro (25.2%)3 - [+1] David Cook (22.1%)4 - [+1] Brooke White (4.0%)5 - [+1] Carl Smithson (2.8%)6 - [+1] Kristy Lee Cook (2.5%) <--7 - [+1] Syesha Mercado (1.5%)Well, this poll actually just eliminated Michael from his high ranking last week and everyone just moved up a slot. No movement at all. One thing a lot of these polls are doing is appearing to agree with Simon that it may just be a matter of picking off the girls one-by-one until we have an all guy finale. In fact, Jason Castro has even started to get right into the mix with the Davids in poll popularity.

TV Squad1 - [+5] David Cook (61.5%)2 - [=] David Archuleta (15.9%)3 - [-2] Jason Castro (12.6%)4 - [-1] Kristy Lee Cook (3.4%) <--5 - [=] Syesha Mercado (3.2%)6 - [+1] Brooke White (1.8%)7 - [+1] Carly Smithson (1.6%)As always, the TVS poll seems to be much more a direct reaction to the previous night's performance, and thus the rankings tend to fluctuate more here than in most other polls depending on how each individual contestant does. As such, the domination of David Cook is more a reflection of the strength of this one performance just as his much lower placement last week was a reflection of the worst job he'd done all season.

Dial Idol1 - [+5] David Cook (21.1%)2 - [-1] David Archuleta (19.6%)3 - [-1] Jason Castro (11.6%)4 - [-1] Kristy Lee Cook (9.5%) <--5 - [+3] Carly Smithson (7.8%)6 - [-2] Brooke White (6.2%)7 - [=] Syesha Mercado (6.1%)Well, DialIdol got this one wrong by actually predicting that Kristy would be safe. In fact, looking back through these polls it looks like they all got it wrong. And the vast majority of them continue to have Syesha in the bottom spot, and she came in third to last in voting. It's fascinating to me that she ranks dead last in most of these polls week after week after week and yet doesn't get eliminated.

Still, I'd say the writing is on the wall for the ladies unless they really turn things around with some amazing performances. And with Andrew Lloyd Weber coming up, I think Brooke might be the lady in trouble the most right now out of the remaining three. If she can dig deep enough into his catalog to find a beautiful heartfelt ballad that doesn't have a lot of range and power requirements she could be okay, but I really think she might find this week as difficult as she did Mariah.

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8 Comments

Dial Idol is not a poll. It is unlike any of the other on-line polls because it uses the dial results of whether a vote gets through or it doesn't because of busy signal. The theory behind DialIdol is that during the monitored intervals of voting, the highest busy signal percentage lines would be the highest vote getters. Dial Idol does not add up to 100% because the scores are NOT percentage of the vote like the polls. The DialIdol score represents more like a summarized busy percentage during the voting period after every show.

There are a few "heartfelt" songs in the ALW catalog thatBrooke might be able to pull off. For instance, thereis I Don't Know How to Love Him from Jesus ChristSuperstar or All I Ask of You from Phantom. These twocan be done in Brooke's soft style and without thepower that many ALW songs need.

AI should publish the actual numbers. I think the vote is only "part" of the reason people get "voted" off the show. If it is tuly an honest show, they should be willing to give the numbers every week.

Just one thought... what if the so-called "bottom two" aren't the bottom two at all? What if sometimes they send the second to last place person to safety, and the "bottom two" are actually the last place and third to last?

This isn't just conspiracy theory -- it's also based on knowing the the producers can be slimy and misleading.